


Like Ice and Sunlight

by Pouxin



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Multi, My husband made me watch Vikings so of course I slashed the hell out of it, Wrote this years ago not sure why I never posted it, basically a drabble, silly boys in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 21:25:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15693672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pouxin/pseuds/Pouxin
Summary: Sometimes it surprises Floki to remember there was a time when he didn’t have to share Ragnar Lothbrokwith anyone at all.





	Like Ice and Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> Completely un-betaed so all mistakes are my own.

Sometimes it surprises Floki to remember there was a time when he didn’t have to share Ragnar Lothbrok with _anyone at all_.  They were young and foolish, tight and hot with the promise of it all, desire as abundant in them as their come.  The younger girls were uninterested, not quite out of the stage of finding boys largely disgusting, and the older girls found them silly, insubstantial.  So there was each other, rolling in the long grass like wolf cubs, discovering all the surprising things their bodies could do.  Both already trained for war, strong and lean, hands already rough from the pull of a bowstring, the newly hewn handle of an axe.  But each other’s rough hands so different from their own.  It felt the same, but it felt so different.  Different in a molten, brilliant, maddening way.  Yes, Ragnar had always made him mad for it, but he was mad anyway, so that new, hungry, wholly physical madness was like a balm for his sore mind. 

Perhaps it surprises him to remember this time, because when Lagertha had come along he hadn’t minded sharing Ragnar much, not really.  As their own touchings had turned from boyish tumbling and roughhousing to something deeper, darker, more serious - no less good - Lagertha came into Ragnar’s life. And it was some sort of relief.  She made him light, happy; she took away some of the snapping shiftiness in his eyes.  She gave him the children he so longed for.  And they all shared really, the times there were three of them in the bed, memories of Lagertha’s own berry pink nipples, her laughter, her arching back, the dimples there at the base of her spine, his tongue in them, her taste like ice and sunlight.  Waking against the cream of her pale skin, milk flecked with sugary freckles.  He didn’t mind sharing Ragnar with Lagertha, because it was just that: sharing.

The Athelstan came, and he _took_.  He took Ragnar from him in every way it is possible for a man to be taken from.  He took him physically, yes – and how it had been to see _that_ , those shadows against the side of Ragnar’s tent in the firelight, stumbling back through camp, half drunk, then suddenly, shockingly, upright and sober.  The dull horror of his worst fears made flesh.  But, also, he took Ragnar’s time, Ragnar’s good opinion, Ragnar’s easy affection.  All the things he once bestowed so casually on Floki. 

The loss of these things burned at Floki in a way no madness had ever scorched him before.  A never-ending flay of betrayal that carves his skin from his very bones.  There is pleasure in pain, Floki has always found, and yet there is no pleasure in this.  But there _was_ pleasure in the pain Athelstan received as he died at Floki’s axe, eyes turned upwards towards his god in a kind of ecstasy.  His blood on Floki’s lips tastes like ice and sunlight. 

He thought Ragnar might kill him then, but Ragnar chooses something else instead, the slow torture of the water, only enough to madden, never enough to salve the fire that burns on and on in Floki’s very soul.  It is a punishment both superbly clever and exquisitely cruel.  But then, Ragnar was always sly, always cruel, always too held back, cunning and practiced and fox-eyed.  _But didn’t you always love his great wolf heart?  Mad, mad.  A mad wolf heart like your own.  Howling at the beauty of the moon, the beauty of the night, the beauty of everything_.  Huginn and Munnin come to laugh at him with their rough caws as he stands there, tight and helpless against Ragnar’s ropes, their talons twist in his belly, their beaks gorge and pull at his mind.  _Oh my thoughts, oh my memories, oh my love.  When you loved me, why must I remember, why must I remember that you once loved me.  Oh what a feeling it is to be in love with someone who used to be in love with you._   Every moment draws his heart ever tighter on the rack.  _But this was how it was to love Ragnar Lothbrok, wasn’t it?  This was how it had always been to love him._

He knew then that Ragnar would never love him again, that he had taken that precious thing and turned it to ashes and blood.  That Ragnar sent him to Paris not to earn back his love, but to lose it forever.  That Ragnar sent him to Paris to die.  And there, in that last moment, Ragnar’s eyes, flat and grey as the cold of the water.  _I accept your punishment.  I will sink beneath the coldness of your gaze like a stone, I will breathe in the flatness of your eyes til they fill my lungs with death._

But then Ragnar’s hands on him, in the river.  Hands that are rough from bow strings, from newly hewn axe handles.  Hands that are soft from the times they have cupped Floki’s face, pulled his cock, held his heart.  Hands that drag him, quick and gasping and silvery, into the air and the light.  Ice and sunlight.  For this, too, is how it is to love Ragnar Lothbrok.  A kind of dying.  A kind of saving.  A kind of life. 


End file.
